Nevada
A city is a machine, and to be within one is to be a part of its mechanism. You move with the ebb and flow of its multitude of clockwork elements – pausing at traffic lights, standing on the moving floor of the bus, walking with the pedestrian herd – or you become a bit of grit, grinding against the cogs and sprockets of its intricacies, bitten by the teeth of its gears. Some people become machine parts with ease. They relish the relative safety or illusion thereof supplied by the predictable rhythm of their environment. Others grow to see it as some fiendish contraption, an infernal device designed to restrict and impede the natural world upon which it is imposed, a trap designed by its prisoners to be seductive yet demanding and, in the end, inescapable. The day came when I felt the city around me tightening its embrace, an urban straitjacket. I was still a young man then, full of fire and acid and a thousand mistakes yet to be made. Like so many men my age I had dallied and dabbled with the demimonde, known all the places of hip distraction. Some were edgy, others, louche. From door to door on a single block I could find cheap alcohol or fancy drugs, soft women or hard violence. There were many such blocks, and I had worn the soles from my shoes in walking them. Yet even this debauched aspect of the city was still the city and so no more than a greasier part of the machine, oil spraying in my eyes. The day came, and I felt the need to depart. My escape from the prison of civilization came without fanfare or notice. I slipped out the way one might depart in the cold morning light from the bed of a stranger with whom one has spent a fumbling and confused night. Quietly I gathered my belongings and slipped away, fearful only slightly that the city would reach up from that warm and inviting bed and run its practiced fingers across my back as I reached for my shirt, enticing me to stay just a little bit longer. What I chose to take with me barely filled half the bed of my small pickup truck. I bequeathed the furniture, the décor, the implements of the kitchen such as they were to its next occupant and bid the unimpressive warren I called home good-bye. Before the sun had risen fully in the sky I had left the city behind. I made my way east. No set destination, no plan or waypoint occupied my thoughts. All I had was the open road, flat ribbon of asphalt stretching forward towards the blurred impression of something on the horizon that kept its distance for much of the day. The radio faded from whatever random station it played to a steady fuzz of static punctuated with the occasional pop or squeal. Once in a while would come whispers from the drift of a faraway broadcast, snatches of speech whose muffled fragments may have been lures to return to the soporific folds of the city, or perhaps they were voices trapped in the winds, pleading that I not venture too deeply into the wilderness. If they had a message to me it was ignored. Soon enough I passed a sign informing me I had entered Nevada. This I met with mild surprise. It was my impression that the state was some distance away. I was mindful to keep off the main highways and avoid passing through the gaudy and noisome cities that grew there, candy-colored mirages built with parasitic artifice. It would not do to escape the traps of one city only to be ensnared by another. I stopped only once that day, at a gas station I at first thought was abandoned. It bore the faded sigils of a long-gone brand of gasoline on its antique pumps and garage. All was covered in the monochromatic dust of the surrounding desert, a study in terra cotta broken only by the presence of a sign in the garage window whose violet neon glow proclaimed the station “OPE”. I pulled up to the pumps and gave the horn a honk but there was no immediate reaction. Thinking the place deserted I got out of the cab and wandered around the side in search of a restroom. No such convenience presented itself and with no one around to object I relieved myself on the building wall. On my completion I noticed a strange stillness of sound. I expected the places outside the city to be quiet, but this was a silence bereft of wind or of animal activity, a quiet that seemed almost artificial. Its presence became all the more punctual when on returning to my truck I was greeted by the sight of an old man standing next to it. Long and lean, he wore a battered fedora atop close-cropped hair while the stubble of several days salted and peppered a face burnt and wrinkled by the desert sun. A jacket of faded tartan plaid topped a pair of overalls caked in grease and grime, which in turn almost concealed a grey work shirt whose collar he wore open yet encircled by a bolo tie with a large onyx oval as its clasp. Silently he stood by the driver’s door and waited. I nodded in greeting. He returned my nod, and with no further ado went to the nearest of the gas pumps and began to fill the tank of my truck. I stood about for the several minutes it took him to complete his task, studying the highway beside us. I couldn’t recall passing another vehicle in several hours, nor did I see any other structures besides the station. The sky was cloudless and the sun directly overhead. All in all it seemed a picture, a landscape executed in oils that might adorn the lobby of a cheap hotel. When he was done he came back around to my side of the truck. “Three dollars.” I almost laughed at the absurdly low cost but said nothing as I pulled out my wallet and handed him a ten. He looked at it kinda queer for a moment, almost like he’d never seen one before. Then he nodded hard like he had realized something. He lifted his hat and put the bill into it, then fished into his pocket and offered me a fistful of silver dollars that had to be older than he was. Any one of them was worth more than the gas I’d got, but he held them out to me and I took them all the same. He looked at me sternly. “Best you keep your lights on”, he said without explanation. I looked around him at the brilliant early afternoon sky. “I’ll do that.” Without another word he turned and walked into the station. The shadows inside obscured him instantly despite the bright sun shining above. You might almost think that light wasn’t allowed in there. I took a long look at those silver dollars before shoving them in my own pocket, climbing into the truck and going on my way. The afternoon passed languidly, the sun blazing behind me as it made its procession towards the horizon. The radio continued to emit a static fuzz while the voices hidden within grew ever slightly more present. On occasion I imagined I understood some portion of their whispers. A hoarse and ancient voice spoke of “rose ruby in fire”, while that of a timid teenage girl clearly said, “Conquistador”. Strange laughter seemed to contain a warning of “eyes in the night”. One patch consisted of a strange, rhythmic sound as if drums played in the distance. Over all was the endless phase of some carrier wave. I could almost imagine the voices as flotsam being washed onto some uninhabited shore by waves of sound. Inevitably the sun grew golden and slid beneath the ground behind me. My hand moved reflexively to the switch and lit the headlamps of my truck. Only after doing so did the words of the old man at the filling station return to me. For some reason they took on an inexplicable eeriness. I drove for several hours more into the deepening dark. At one point I realized that I had not seen another vehicle since before my stop at the service station. In fact, I had seen nothing, no roadside building or structure, no billboards or highway markers. Only the road with its single painted line running unbroken down its center. It must have been the night of a new moon as no sign of that globe could be seen in the sky. The headlamps before me obliterated any trace of the stars above. The time came when I felt my eyes go heavy. The dashboard clock indicated the time was near midnight. A glance at the gas gauge surprised me with how little had been consumed in the hours since my refueling. I excused it for my lack of experience in highway driving. A yawn compelled me to slow and look for a place to catch a few hours of sleep. I thought it best to get off the road in case some fellow traveler should fail to see me on the embankment and, weaving from drink or exhaustion, cause a fatal collision. It wasn’t long before I saw a place where the roadside seemed flat with the surrounding land and I slowed and eased off the road. I had meant to drive only a few yards and stop, safe from speeding passers-by. Yet I found myself possessed of a need to continue moving, to proceed slowly across the desert floor without a care for place or destination. It is a wonder to think back on that moment and realize how easily a tangled bramble or unnoticed boulder could have disabled my vehicle and left me stranded. That did not happen, and I drove for I don’t know how long until I reached what had to be the middle of nowhere as there was nothing there but myself. I brought my truck to a stop and idled there some minutes without a thought. I could not see the stars or the horizon, only the ground before me illuminated by the headlights. I turned the key and silenced the engine but in the resulting silence there was no sound of wind, or insect, or animals on the prowl. There was not even the sound of my own breathing for I had held it since stopping there. Some strange tension had taken hold of me, and when at last I finally did breathe in it was with a gasp as if I were emerging from some torpor or trance. Out of habit my hand reached to shut off the headlights when it froze in mid-gesture as the words of the old man at the service station returned to me. I let my hand fall upon the wheel and join its match as I wondered why I had come to this place, wherever this place may have been. I considered my options. There was no guarantee that any attempt to return to the highway in the dark would be as hazard-free as the drive to my present location. There was also no rush, as I had no set destination or timetable. It seemed best to stay put and wait for the dawn before continuing my journey. No sooner did I conclude this than did sleep take me. I didn’t realize how tired I was until I awoke with a start some time later. The headlamps of the truck still burned bright while the night seemed darker than ever around their pool of light. I did not think to glance at the dashboard clock. It was the dead of night, a time when in my urban excursions I might encounter the odd, the disturbing, the strange inhabitants of the city that passed between its mechanisms and dwelled in it shadows. Abandoned things, forgotten things, things longing to be forgotten. Often they did not desire contact and skittered about in the periphery of one’s vision, easily dismissed as the phantom children of drink and fatigue. Then there were those more direct encounters, blissfully few, where one had little choice but to confront their existence and entertain their demands, be it with love or violence. That was the city. This was not. Where or what this was I could not say. But as I sat there I felt the air grow dry and crisp, and was possessed of an unfamiliar tension. I was far from the city, far from the road, far from everywhere and everything. And I was not alone. Something appeared at the very edge of the light. Strange shapes moving quickly, shreds of some diaphanous material that flickered and darted about. There were dozens of them, each notable from the others by the presence of a point of light that I assumed was a glowing eye at the leading end. I listened but heard no sound to accompany their movement. They could not be excused for dust or tumbleweeds, not that they looked at all like such. Whatever was out there teasing with the lights were doing so of their own volition. They were alive. After many minutes of this activity those flitting shapes scattered at once, reminding me of how a school of fish will disperse at the imminence of a predator. I sensed the approach of something dire. I did not have to wait long. There came a blast of wind so strong I gripped the wheel and braced myself out of fear the truck would overturn. The sound of it was percussive, a great explosion. A storm of dust was thrown up around me and I could no longer see the world outside. The blast became a persistent howl that only faded after many minutes. I felt as if I had been dropped into a maelstrom. Had a twister fell from the skies onto me? I could not say. The howl and fury of the wind began to fade. Slowly the illumination of the truck headlamps were once again visible, filled with swirling dust. That would also disperse, leaving me to stare at an island of light in a sea of night. An island, with visitors standing on its shores. There at the light’s edge stood a pack of coyotes, their eyes gleaming red. From behind them approached a man, or I thought it a man at first, though it was too tall and seemed to fray at its edges. It diminished and firmed as it came to the light’s edge. It stepped between two of the coyotes and into the light. Whatever it had been, it now appeared to me as a man. His long, silver hair was gathered into a thick braid that fell to his back, while his hairless face had the sun-burnt and weathered features of the native peoples who once called this land their own. He wore the clothes of a ranch hand, plaid shirt over jeans and well-worn boots. The stranger stood there, eyes undimmed by age staring at me for I don’t know how long before walking over to the driver’s door. He made a circular motion with his hand. I figured he wanted me to lower the window, so I did. “Evening”, he said. “Evening”, I replied. “You’re a long way from home, friend.” I nodded. “I am.” “You’ve a long ways to go.” “I do.” He frowned slightly. “You shouldn’t be here. This is the place of sorrows, of death and green glass. He who destroys worlds has touched it.” He looked a moment at the front of my truck. “Good thing you didn’t turn your lights off. They kept the phouka from getting too close. Had they touched you, they would have taken much from you.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what that means.” “Yes.” He paused, as if waiting for me to say or do something. Then, “The man on the highway, he gave you something.” “Gasoline.” “Sure. And, what else?” “Uh, nothing, he…no, wait. He gave me change.” I reached into my pocket, felt the heavy silver coins the man at the station gave me. “Old coins, silver ones.” The stranger nodded. “You will need those before you reach your destination. Do not lose them.” “Okay.” Pause. “Should I give you one?” The stranger smiled. “I would not refuse one were you to offer it to me. But you may regret not having it, before the end. Depends on the choices you make.” I handed him a coin, which he slipped into his shirt pocket. “I will tell the others of your generosity.” I nodded, then asked, “What should I do now?” The stranger began to walk back towards the pack of coyotes. “Now, blink your eyes.” I closed my eyes tightly for a moment. A wave of disorientation came over me and I sat back in the seat. Shaking my head, I opened my eyes to see the sun making its way over the horizon to my right. The country around me was visible once more, and there was no sign of the old man or his coyotes. The engine took a moment to turn over but soon enough I was on my way. I followed the tracks I had left in the sand until I reached the highway and continued my journey. Soon enough I felt the need for food and pulled in to a busy truck stop. Parking my pickup far from the big rigs I hopped out and made for the rest room. Then it was into the diner for a real trucker’s breakfast and a bag of stuff to go. As I walked towards my pickup I could see the wheels had a strange look to them, almost as if they had a glow. I crouched down and looked to see the treads were dusted with a fine powder of green glass. From within the cab the radio blared with a burst of static, in which I thought I heard a coyote’s howl. Category:Fanfic Category:Creepypasta